Sandy Bridge to be released jan 9th - Page 8

On January 17 2011 20:18 TBO wrote:
If you get a Sandy Bridge, you should avoid ASUS boards for now - there seems to be a lot of trouble with them (nearly no RAM working together with them flawlessly if even at all). Sadly I had to experience that firsthand before reading about it ;(

On January 17 2011 21:18 R1CH wrote:
Built two systems with Asus boards, both work fine with two different brands of RAM (certified for P67). Are you setting the memory profile to XMP so the board knows what voltage to supply?

"In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives."

On February 01 2011 04:15 Fishball wrote:
Thought I might share this here.



http://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6series-chipset-begins-recall

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/cougar-point-sandy-bridge-sata-error,12108.html

On February 01 2011 05:06 cHaNg-sTa wrote:

I hope people are aware of this. That sounds really bad.

Basically, the simplified explanation is that there are 2 disk drive controllers on the P67/H67 motherboards, controlling a total of 6 "SATA" disk drive ports (usable for Hard Drives, Solid State Drives, and CD/DVD Drives).

2 of the ports are higher speed SATA-III (6 Gigabit/second) and are unaffected by this issue.

4 of the ports are on lower speed SATA-II (3 Gigabit/second) and will slowly degrade over time. Degrade in this case being defined as "will show data transfer error and retry, resulting in longer and longer data access times, until eventually the drive on the controller will drop off as a detected device". The DRIVES themselves are not damaged, they can be installed and recognized and used as normal if shifted to a working controller/port.

The fault appears to happen in 5-15% of the affected motherboards (depending on usage) over a 1-3 year period. Or much more often as is being reported by RAID users (where the drives are strung together to make one virtual drive, with a much higher read/write activity quotient).

Official response from various PC vendors has been "Keep using your system, move to a SATA-III port if you can, and once the supply chain catches up around about April, return your motherboard for an exchange".

Unless you're a heavy data I/O user, RAID user, this issue is unlikely to affect you at all in the short term.

(Disclaimer, I am not a Maingear, Intel, Newegg, or other retailer employee, I'm a volunteer tech over at the Newegg customer tech support forums)

There's a very strong knee-jerk return trend being observed in the field, that's why I'm trying to stress that the average user/owner will not certainly encounter this issue during a normal PC service lifetime. This is NOT a formal recall of all parts, but pc part vendors are generally honoring returns in good faith because there are no current parts in the pipeline that are free of this issue. If you have some patience, some technical common sense, and not a little bit of faith, you can make sure you are unaffected by this issue in the short term - and in the long term, all will be made good. Yeah it's a hassle, yeah nobody likes it, but if you have a working system, it's not going to just magically go poof and die on you overnight. You WILL see speed degradation over time as a symptom. You CAN switch ports to work around the issue (a $25 PCIE SATA controller works pretty well too). This is by no means a fatally flawed platform.

Relevant Data: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20030052-1.html?tag=river

On February 01 2011 08:38 skyR wrote:
Bulldozer won't be ready for a Q2 launch. Keep dreaming I guess =\